What A Great Company To Work For- NOT!
As some of you may know, I’m searching for a new software contract as my 6+ year contract w/ Sempra (SoCalGas) has been completed. I was hoping to get some more work from Sempra, as they are very good to me since I’ve done 3 previous projects for them and they let me work from home. But alas, it was not to be, so I have been searching my favorite contract site, dice.com.
This morning I saw a contract for exactly what I do- Lotus Notes/Domino development with various RDBMS back-ends (Oracle, DB2, SQL Server) with web front-ends. The company is relatively local (Monrovia) and I was kind of excited as I started putting together a cover letter in my head.
Then I did a double-take as I read the requirements- “Must attend and participate in weekly Chapel services”. Huh? Is this like the Catholic high school that I attended and loathed so much? How can this be? What if I’m Jewish? Is this discrimination? I looked closer, and researched their web site, to find this info in the “Careers” section:
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Spiritual Benefits
Daily Devotions, Weekly Chapel, Annual Day of Prayer
Daily devotions or prayer times occur within each department, giving a time of small-group reflection with co-workers before facing the challenges of the day. We gather at a weekly chapel service for prayer, praise, and updates on our work around the world
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I’m pretty sure this is a not-for-profit organization- how can they do this? It kind of reminds me of when I was on a contract at Bank of America and when United Way giving time came, the thumbscrews tightened and EVERYONE in each department “had” to give, as the departments competed to see who could give the most (as a contractor, I was still expected to participate). Then the scandel at United Way broke, about the executives spending hundreds of thousands of dollars remodeling the bathroom in their office, and similar indescretions, and BofA slowed down the “urging” of employee participation.
Trust me, I would never work for a company that required me to participate in Chapel services just so I could work there. The funny thing is they took their job posting down from dice.com after about 8 hours- I wonder why…